Danny Lee Kyllo v. United States (533 U.S. 27)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 11, 2001 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 533 U.S. 27 · 121 S. Ct. 2038
- Decided
- June 11, 2001
- Term
- October Term 2000
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Scalia
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
Opinion excerpt
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents the question whether the use of a thermal-imaging device aimed at a private home from a public street to detect relative amounts of heat within the home constitutes a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. I In 1991 Agent William Elliott of the United States Department of the Interior came to suspect that marijuana was being grown in the home belonging to petitioner Danny Kyllo, part of a triplex on Rhododendron Drive in Florence, Oregon. Indoor marijuana growth typically requires high-intensity lamps. In order to determine whether an amount of heat was emanating from petitioner’s home consistent with the use of such lamps, at 3:20 a.m. on January 16,1992, Agent Elliott and Dan Haas used an Agema Thermovision 210 thermal imager to scan the triplex. Thermal imagers detect infrared radiation, which virtually all objects emit but which is not visible to the naked eye. The imager converts radiation into images based on relative warmth — black is cool, white is hot, shades of gray connote relative differences; in that respect, it operates somewhat like a video camera showing heat images. The scan of Kyllo’s home took only a few minutes and was performed from the passenger seat of Agent Elliott’s vehicle across the street from the front of the house and also from the street in back of the house. The…
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